The present invention relates to apparatus for transferring rows of discrete articles from a moving conveyor and, in particular, relates to such an apparatus for use in unloading rows of fragile baked products from a bakery oven and transferring the baked articles to further bakery processing operations.
Typically, continuous bakery ovens include a wide hearth conveyor which carries longitudinally spaced-apart transverse rows of product through the oven for baking and then delivers the baked product to further processing stations, such as for cooling, depanning, packaging and the like. The mechanism for unloading an oven hearth conveyor is typically a take-away conveyor which travels at right angles to the direction of travel of the hearth conveyor. The take-away conveyor comes to rest to permit a row of product from the hearth conveyor to be deposited thereon, and then is started and runs a distance equal to at least the width of the hearth conveyor so as to remove the unloaded product from in front of the hearth conveyor and provide space for the next row of product coming from the oven. In this arrangement, the unloaded product must normally be regrouped downstream of the oven unloader by either accelerating or delaying the row of product to provide the proper grouping and spacing for further processing, since the downstream processing operations, such as cooling, typically operate upon a stream of product several articles wide, but considerably narrower than the width of the hearth conveyor. This arrangement is satisfactory for rigid products such as bun or bread pans which are not adversely affected by the regrouping process.
But in the case of fragile items such as pies which are baked in thin foils or tins, the prior art unloading process is not satisfactory, because any physical regrouping of the unloaded product to attain the desired spacing for further processing can be detrimental to the fragile baked products.
Furthermore, even with relatively rigid products such as bun pans and bread pans, the intermittent motion of the take-away conveyor and the concomitant downstream regrouping is a complicated, expensive and inconvenient arrangement, since each additional step of product manipulation increases the complexity of the system and the possibility of damage to the product.
There is, therefore, a need for an apparatus for unloading a bakery oven in such a way that the unloaded product can be continuously carried away from the oven in a different direction and in a product grouping suitable for downstream processing so as to obviate further regrouping or respacing of the product. Applicants are not aware of any such unloading arrangement in the prior art. Applicants have no literature dealing with the prior art oven unloaders described above.